Roskomnadzor will block 1 million IP-addresses for the sake of banning Telegram

"The Russian authorities have begun to block Telegram" - such a notice to the developers Telegram sent out to users on April 16. They also warned that without a VPN the service could be unstable. Roskomnadzor is looking for VPN-services and proxy servers, which allow to bypass the blocking of Telegram, a representative of the department said. The decision to block the messenger, whose audience in Russia is 15 million people (according to its founder, Pavel Durov), April 13, Moscow Tagansky Court.

During the day on April 16 in social networks, users' messages about the blockage of Telegram on the networks of all mobile operators spread. For example, Megafon subscribers noted a lock in the middle of the day, but after a few hours access was restored without additional settings. As of 20.30 MSK messenger worked without VPN services and proxy servers from correspondents of Vedomosti - users of all mobile operators, although on VimpelCom networks - with interruptions. Representatives of Vimpelcom, MTS, Megafon and Tele2 declined to comment.

The lock will take operators a day or two, small providers have a bit more, says OMMG Technology owner (messenger platform) Sergey Kravtsov. However, a maximum of 24 hours a day new addresses and URLs from the Roskomnadzor registry should be unloaded into the operator's equipment, an employee of one of them says, after which access to them should be blocked.

Operators unload the list of IP addresses and web resources, including banned ones, from the Roskomnadzor registry gradually, so the blockage is not instantaneous, explains Anna Prosvetova, spokeswoman for the company-developer of cybersecurity solutions Vee Security. The head of Roskomvoboda, Artem Kozlyuk, notes that Roskomnadzor will continue to add to the list of banned addresses: according to the first list, users have already lost access to the web version of telegram.org, and now the agency will look for workarounds for the application. Operators are required to block only known IP addresses and web resources and if the messenger massively changes them, it will be able to last for a long time, says a technical specialist of one of the providers.

Alexander Zharov, the head of Roskomnadzor, told Vedomosti: "The projectile and armor are struggling - we identify the IP addresses through which the messenger is migrating and block them. First, he used about 9000 of his own IP-addresses, we sent them to a lock. Then he switched to an Amazon subnet (about 600,000 IP), they were also sent to the block. Now Telegram switched to IP addresses of another resource (about 540,000), which will also be blocked in the near future. We expect that by the end of the day this will give a result. "

The strategy of constant change of IP-addresses already used another banned messenger - Zello. The service team used the features of cloud platforms (for example, Amazon Web Services), which give access to a large number of IP addresses, making it difficult to lock the application, Zello co-founder Alexei Gavrilov told Vedomosti. Roskomnadzor took a year and threats to block millions of Amazon IP-addresses, so that this method ceased to work and the service managed to restrict access to Zello in Russia. But the blocking of Amazon servers can lead to temporary interruptions in the operation of a huge number of services, to which the authorities have no complaints, says Alexander Demidov, director of cloud services at Bitrix24.